Accidental 'Lighthouse = Writing' metaphor

So I accidentally-on-purpose mentioned my site to a couple people, so someone would read it, but no one bit. Then I blatantly plugged it to a couple people. Nothing. Finally I resorted to actually writing the address on one of my student’s papers. Sad, yes? Thank God someone seems to have looked at it, though, because the next step might have gotten pretty desperate. T-shirts. Assignments to my students. Walking around town with a sandwich board (“The end is nigh! To learn more, log on to Once Wide World…”). Breaking into people’s houses and forcing them to read. Writing an entry using phrases like “barely legal” “free sex” and so forth, just to get a couple of Google hits.

Which I guess I just did…

Anyways.

What is it about external confirmation that is so important? I mean, why not just write on yellow legal-pads and keep them in a trunk somewhere a la Dickinson (minus the Miss Havisham/crazy aspects)? It’s not enough to write, we need someone else to see it. Yes, yes I know there are oh-so-many exceptions, Dickinson, Keats writing “Ode to a Nightingale” on a scrap and shoving it in the bookcase, and so forth. But you know that Keats was hoping someone was going to grab the poem from the bookcase and say, “Wow, John, this poem is kick-ass!” and Dickinson daydreamed about us revering her poetry exactly the way we do. Is it the inherent idea in art of connecting the human experience to one another? Or is it more basic and primitive than that? Seeking approval. That we just never outgrow wanting a pat on the head or heart chuck-on-the-shoulder from mom/the teacher/God. Maybe the two are inextricably bound.

I was at the coast this weekend, and around dusk got very maudlin and grandiose as I stared at a lighthouse. It was a gray sky, and the lighthouse seemed impossibly lonely, impossibly sad, there in the distance. This basic staple of human history – both literally and figuratively – of trying to announce through the darkness that someone else is there; that you’re not alone. That someone wants you to be safe. Lighthouses just seem to capture so much of that feeling on a very elemental level. When you sit staring at a lighthouse, especially at dusk, you get such a sudden blast of understanding just how God damn big the world is, how vast and impossible it all is. But, of course, everything with which we surround ourselves it designed to hide that fact, isn’t it? Ironically, we isolate ourselves from the world to not have to face how lonely it is. It’s only when we try to connect to others that we must face this. Writing is the attempt to connect. It being read is the connection. Hence, wanting people to read what we write. And like it. A lot. That’s always a plus.

Hm. I wasn’t even shooting for the whole ‘Lighthouse as metaphor for writing’ thing. Kind of cool. Kind of sappy.